Wellington football looks to get back on track at homecoming

Thursday

Oct 3, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By JAMES JORDANThe Wellington Daily News

The wellington High School football team suffered its first loss of the season Friday, losing to Wichita Collegiate 49-21. This week is Homecoming, and the Crusaders hope to get back on track against winless Circle, a team that lost 66=7 to Andale last week.

Coach Tyler Ryan said his team has had very good practices since that game, and he hopes they will make improvement and not take Circle lightly.

"They have some talented athletes that can make some plays," he said.Ryan said he feels his team needs a lot of repetition to make improvements.

"For the first three quarters last week, we were doing things that could be corrected. After that we were not doing what we were supposed to do," he said.

Ryan said it will be important to play well early against Circle."If they get some plays early, if we give up some things early, you might see a different Circle team Friday," he said.

Ryan said his team needs to learn from last week and move on.

"We just had mental lapses. You cant give a good team a free pass," he said Monday.

In the game last Friday, Wellington scored early in the third quarter on a a 46 yard run by Austin Dunn, to tie the score at 21. From that point its was all Collegiate, as the team scored four unanswered touchdowns from that point.

Coach Tyler Ryan said he was disappointed in how the team did not continue to play hard.

"We had some flashes of very good football," he said. "But then we had flashes of not very good football."

Wellington had been running a trap pay well, and Austin Dunn was running through holes and getting big chunks of yardage. Ryan said later in the game his team was not blocking those plays properly, which allowed Collegiate to stop the Crusaders.

Wellington had trouble stopping Collegiate all night. The Spartans were able to pass at will in the first half, and in the second half, used a sweep play that gave Wellington a lot of trouble.He had said earlier in the week the team did not match up well with the Spartans and he was concerned about their spread offense.

He said Collegiate did a good job of controlling the line of scrimmage.But Wellington did have its moments.Collegiate scored the first two times it had the ball. The first came on a 54-yard sweet by Seth Carder, and the second one came on a 18-yard run by quarterback Landon Root. Collegiate led 14-0 with four minutes left in the opening quarter. Wellington came back and scored on a 50-yard run up the middle by Austin Dunn. Trevor Nance passed for two to Andrew Horn, and the deficit shrank to 14-8 at the end of the opening quarter.Collegiate scored again in the second, but Wellington did too, on a 30-yard pass from Nance to Colin Reichenberger and cut the deficit to 21-14 with six minutes left in the half.Late in the half wellington drove to the Collegiate 22, but didn't score.Wellington tied the game with 10:31 left in the third on a long run by Dunn.But from there it was all Collegiate, as the Spartans were able to keep the ball and convert big plays.Event hough the score was somewhat lopsided, the statsheet was not.Wellington had 122 yards passing and 173 rushing, for a total of 295. Collegiate had 157 passing and 209 rushing, for a total of 366.Wellington quarterback Trevor Nance completed eight of 18 passes for 122 yards and one touchdown.Austin Dunn ran for 154 yards, including a 56 yard touchdown run. He averaged 8.6 yards per carry.Colin Reichenberger caught five passes for 77 yards and one touchdown for Wellington.Collegiate quarterback Landton Root completed 16 of 25 passes for 157 yards.